Indie Game The Movie Bundle

Now there's even more reason to use that holiday cash Aunt Myrtle sent you on something charitable. The ongoing Humble Indie Bundle 7 has just expanded its indie game offerings to include The Basement Collection of Flash games, the action puzzle platformer Offspring Fling, and the retro 2D platformer Cave Story. The original bundle was packed with indie hits Snapshot, Closure, The Binding of Isaac and its Wrath of the Lamb DLC, Shank 2, Dungeon Defenders and its DLC, Legend of Grimrock, and the documentary Indie Game: The Movie. So, for the next six days, you can snatch up nine full games and one movie for a price that's absurdly close to free.

If you haven't done a Humble Bundle before, here's how it works: You can donate any amount of money and receive Snapshot, Closure, The Binding of Isaac, Shank 2, and Indie Game: The Movie. But if you pay more than the average ($6.41 as of this writing), you'll also get Dungeon Defenders, Legend of Grimrock, The Basement Collection, Offspring Fling, and Cave Story. The folks at Humble Bundle estimate the total value of this collection at $170. You can even choose how you'd like to have your payment divided between the developers and the two benefiting organizations, Child's Play Charity and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

For more information on the games included in the bundle, check out the trailer for Humble Indie Bundle 7 here.

Valve kicked off its epic Steam Holiday Sale today, offering heavy discounts, flash sales, and catalog clearances lasting until January 5. And before we start drifting dangerously into wallet-pun territory, know you'll be able vote for a select game every 12 hours to go on sale.

Here's a sampling of the sales and flash deals (if you can call a 15-hour timespan a "flash") available for purchase right now:

60% off Natural Selection 2 ($10/£6) 50% off War of the Roses ($15/£9) 50% off Borderlands 2 ($30/£18.50)

The current nominees for the Community's Choice sale are Limbo, The Secret of Monkey Island, and Braid. The winner gets 75 percent taken off its price. And if, by some small chance, a specific game deal you're seeking isn't there, Valve can notify you when it shows up if you add the title to your wishlist. Wonderful.

The seventh Humble Indie Bundle is upon us, just in time for the holidays. For whatever cash you've got left over after your shopping's done you get a slew of indie winners that include The Binding of Isaac, bloody platformer Shank 2, the surreal Closure, the gross-tastic Binding of Isaac (and its Wrath of the Lamb DLC), and colorful sidescroller Snapshot.

You'll also get the Indie Game: The Movie documentary, and clearing the average price—$5.87 as of this writing—gets you the excellent Legends of Grimrock and Dungeon Defenders (plus included DLC). That's the holiday spirit!

The bundle's organizers introduce each game with terribly hilarious puns in the trailer below.

You take millions of footsteps in video games and the sound accompanying those movements is probably something that becomes white noise after a while. There's a good chance that won't happen in The Witness, though.

A: 1,119 so far. They sound really good! We will probably be in the Guinness Book of World Records as the game with the most footstep sounds…

Blow elaborates on just how that specific number comes about in the comments:

We have different sounds for left and right foot, always. For any given material there are 5-6 variations for each foot, to avoid mechanical-sounding repeats; let's just say 5 is average.

So for walking on one material, you have 10 footstep sounds minimum. Thus 1119 sound effects would be about 112 materials to walk on.

But actually, it's fewer materials than that, and more footsteps. We have reverb footsteps for specific locations, where we blend reverb in and out, or crossfade between two reverbs, depending on where you are in a room or hallway. We also have "texture footsteps" that are meant to be layered onto a base sound… so if you are walking on grass, but a little bit of dirt is poking through the grass, the game will play the grass footstep, but with a little bit of dirt texture overlayed on top of it. (The loudness of the dirt texture sound will be scaled by how much dirt is poking through the grass).

The reason behind all this is: The Witness is a game about you wandering through a deserted island. You are the only active character in the game, so the sound of your own motion is hugely important for establishing setting and mood.

The guys at Wabi Sabi sound are doing all this work. It is coming out very well!

The entire gaming world and its robo-dog is currently going from door-to-door and begging for cash, so a shaft of philanthrophic light amidst the Kickstarted darkness is a welcome one. We posted about Mario/McMillen & Refenes mash-up Super Meat Boy Galaxy last week, but it was unclear whether Aubrey Hesselgren would ever share more of his half-gag, half-tribute project with the world. Turns out, he will. BUT ON ONE CONDITION. That condition is cash. Of course it’s cash! This cash will not, however, go to the developer – it will go to The Samaritans. If SMBG is successfully ‘ransomed’ for £10,000, its prototype will be freed and released to the public.

Blood money, I call it! Blood money! And also a very smart idea. (more…)

Super Meat Boy Galaxy is a prototype for a 3D version of Super Meat Boy set on a Mario Galaxy-esque globe. It was created by developer at Preloaded, Aubrey Hesselgren, as a 30th birthday present for Super Meat Boy programmer, Tommy Refenes. On his blog, Hesselgren has announced that he's decided to hold his own prototype to ransom in an attempt to raise £10k for the The Samaritans. Here's the ransom note.

Hesselgren describes the prototype as "just a bit of a throw away experiment. It was never intended as a “pitch” to make such a game." If the £10k goal is met, Super Meat Boy Galaxy will be released from its basement, wrapped in a police blanket, led away to safety and then released to the public for everyone to play. If it doesn't meet the target, those who donate will still get a copy of the prototype. Though Hesselgren has hinted that he'll probably end up releasing it for everyone to play anyway adding "I'm the worst ransomer ever."

"Bear in mind that this is a prototype, and as such will not be as friendly and polished as a final game," he adds. "Its main purpose was to investigate whether Super Meat Boy’s kinaesthetically pleasing platforming physics could survive the leap to 3D, given the right camera and level layouts." This video suggests that those pleasing platforming mechanics translate rather well, don't you think?

Developer Aubrey Hesselgren has released a video of his "completely unofficial 3D version" of Super Meat Boy, which he whipped up for Tommy Refenes' (one half of Team Meat) 30th birthday. Using Unity and Blender, Hesselgren - also known as HilariousCow - combined SMB's bloody walljumping with the wraparound worlds of Super Mario Galaxy, and the result is a demo/proof-of-concept that's far better than many commercial attempts to move a 2D series into the third dimension.

Of course, with this being a birthday present - and "a bit of a training exercise" - Hesselgren has said that he probably won't release it to the wider world. At least we'll always have this video, which shows that it is possible to convert something like Super Meat Boy into 3D, if you take the time to get over the camera hurdles. Can someone do Binding of Isaac next, please?

Over-talented game dev Aubrey Hesselgren crafted an unofficial 3D mashup of Super Meat Boy and Super Mario Galaxy, apparently “for Tommy Refenes’ 30th Birthday”. You can see a video of it in action below. Hesselgren says on a Reddit thread devoted to the idea: “It’s just an experiment in adaptation. I kept hearing people write off 3D games with all the arguments about spatial perception, limited information etc, and wanted to try to tackle a few of their points, just for my own edification. I didn’t want to dismiss what they were saying, but I felt like I had to see for myself. I learnt a lot!” (more…)